Open Source Drones?

Today while surfing the internet, I found a cool drone video by TechHut. As a result, the first thing that came to my mind was how about open-source drones? Is it even a thing?

I did a quick internet surf and found that yes, open-source drones do exist. Does that sound alien to you? Read this post. Here I’m going to talk about what open-source drones exactly are. Let’s find out!

What are Open-Source Drones?

Open-source drones refer to drone projects having a free-to-use license. Developers can publicly work on these projects. Such drone projects revolve around flight control software, communication protocols, battery management systems, and so on. To name a few of them, Paparazzi UAV, Dronecode, ArduPilot, etc.

Brief History of Open-Source Drones

Open source has its roots in the drone industry since the flight control project ArduPilot began in 2009. Apart from that, PX4 was started in 2011. However, cheaper, ready-to-fly drones came into existence in 2013. In 2016, a legal framework was established for commercial drone operations in the US.

Jordi Munoz and Chris Anderson created the ArduPilot project. They also create 3D Robotics. The PX4 Autopilot was made by Lorenz Meier at ETH Zurich. Later Lorenz Meier founded Auterion.

The Ecosystem of Open Source Drones

Apart from flight control software, the drone tech includes MAVLink communication protocol, QGroundControl control station, and MAVSDK. The above image shows the complete ecosystem of open-source projects across the drone industry. The above image shows the complete ecosystem of open-source drones.

Wrapping Up

And that’s a wrap! I hope you find this article useful. I’ll bring another open-source article soon. Till then keep following me on Twitter for all the open-source software updates.

Originally published at http://sufoss.wordpress.com on January 12, 2023.